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When someone criticizes a statement as offensive, bad, or other negative terms besides "false", I ask myself, "Is the statement true or false?" (I tend to ask that about any statement, really, but I think I make a point of doing so in emotionally-charged circumstances.)
He does make word choices like "dullards" and say some things that one could call unnecessarily insulting. But most of it sounds like factual data that he got from reading scientific literature (clicking through to the comment—yup). Is it true or false that there was a set of IQ tests given to aboriginals and the average score was <70? Is it true or false that the (Australian, I assume) government put out a PSA for the purpose of getting aboriginals to not sleep in the road—caused, presumably, by cases of them doing it? (Make a prediction, then google it.)
And if all the above is true, then that seems like a potentially important problem, at least for anyone who cares about the people involved. Are the low IQ test results caused by difficulties in testing people from a very different culture and language, or do they mostly reflect reality? If the latter, what causes it, and can anything be done about it? (Have the aboriginals grown up in a very nutrient-poor or idea-poor environment? If so, then it should be reasonably straightforward to fix that in future generations. If, on the other hand, it's mostly genetic, then we can add that to the list of reasons it's important to develop genetic technologies like embryo selection.)
If it's both true and important, then, taking "important" as roughly implying "necessary", that means it passes the rule of "At least 2 of 3: necessary, kind, true".
The question "How do you have a peaceable democracy (or society in general) with a population...?"—if you take it as a rhetorical question, then that sounds pretty bad. But if you assume the premise is correct (that there's a subpopulation whose "full-grown adults had the cognitive ability of young children"), then it does seem like a genuine question. Are there basic assumptions about democracy, or in our implementation of it, that break down in the presence of such a population? (If not at that level, then is there some level where it does?) What accommodations can be made?
(Whether the question is rhetorical or not—I wonder if this is a case where, if you have a negative prior about someone, you'll take an ambiguous signal and decide it's bad, and use that to justify further lowering your opinion of them, whereas someone with a positive prior will do the opposite.)
The upthread statement I disagreed with is "his posts did not seem to me to embody the virtues of rationality". Looking at the full comment, he brings in data, mentions caveats, makes some calculations and cross-checks them against other sources.
There's more than zero inflammatory rhetoric. But the ratio of facts to inflammatory rhetoric seems ok to me, and I don't see strong evidence that he's operating in bad faith (although the plagiarism thing seems somewhat bad) or that he's in favor of forcibly sterilizing the aboriginals. I note that the comment was posted on a subreddit for people who enjoy arguing.
1I thought you were going to conclude by saying that, since it’s unviable to assume you’ll never get exposed to anything new that’s farther to the right of this spectrum, it’s important to develop skills of bouncing off such things, unaddicting yourself, or otherwise dealing with it.
To that end: I think it helps to perceive the creators of a thing as being malicious manipulators trying to exploit you, and to think of certain things as being Skinner boxes or other known exploits. Why does this game or app do this thing this way? If they wanted me to get maximum value out of it and waste minimal time, they would do it another way. Therefore they’re trying to screw with me. I’m not gonna put up with that.
By the way, I do in fact avoid trying out things like skiing, “just to see what it’s like”, partly because I do not want to discover that I really like it, and then spend all kinds of money and inconvenience and risk on it. (A friend of mine has gotten like three concussions skiing, the cumulative effects of which have serious neurological consequences that are disrupting his daily life, and my impression is that he still wants to ski more. (It’s not his profession—he’s a programmer.)) Likewise I’m not interested in “trying out” foods like ice cream that I’m confident I don’t want to incorporate into my regular diet; if it’s a social event then I’ll relax this attitude, but if such events start happening too frequently in a short period then I resume frowning at foods I think are too, erm, high in the calories:nutrition and especially sugar:nutrition ratio.
For example, in ancient Greece it would have been taboo to say that women should have the same political rights as men.
Would it have been taboo? Or would people have just laughed at you? (Paul Graham said, e.g.: "[O]bviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed." Also relevant: "I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.")
Investigating taboos is the harder problem, so if you solve that, then that's probably sufficient.
It's entirely possible for a highly intelligent person to follow a strategy that is completely fucking idiotic. Common, in fact.
1How different is that from them writing a book about congestion pricing and you reading it? In both scenarios you are basically consuming the outputs of this author's mind.
Well, one difference is that, if you have a question about something the book hasn't specifically addressed in your reading thus far ("How does your theory apply to hotels used by the eclipse-watching crowds in 2017?"), in the first scenario you can just ask the author, but in the second case, after reading the relevant section of the book (and perhaps checking neighboring sections, the index, and the table of contents for any other relevant sections), the only way to answer your question is to think it out yourself. And that seems to be the outcome you want.
(One could reply that you'd be thinking, at least at first, about what the author would say rather than what is true, but I'd say the fact you're reading it in the first place means you believe the author has a way of thinking that is new to you and likely valuable, and hence learning to emulate the thinking [and perhaps narrowing down what parts are worth emulating] is exactly what you should do.)
And in Childhoods of exceptional people, the author finds that immersion in boredom was a universal experience:
But this immersion in boredom is also a universal in the biographies of exceptional people. A substantial fraction were completely kept apart from other children, either because their guardians decided so or because they were bedridden with various illnesses during childhood (like Descartes). A spicy hypothesis raised by this is that socializing too much with children is simply not good for your intellectual development. (I’m not going to test that hypothesis!)
None of this is an airtight argument that solitude is in fact important, but hopefully it at least is intriguing.
It is a correlation and there are good reasons to suspect alternate directions of causation. I'll quote Hollingworth:
THE TENDENCY TO BECOME ISOLATED
Yoder [7] noticed, in studying the boyhood of great men, that although play interests were keen among them, the play was often of a solitary kind. The same is true of children who "test high." The majority of children testing above 160 IQ play little with other children unless special conditions are provided, such as those found in a special class. The difficulties are too great, in the ordinary course of events, in finding playmates who are appropriate in size and congenial in mentality. This fact was noted some years ago by the present writer. Terman [8] in 1930 made a special study of the play of those in his group of children who tested above 170 IQ and found them generally more solitary in work and play than children clustering around 140 IQ.
These superior children are not unfriendly or ungregarious by nature. Typically they strive to play with others but their efforts are defeated by the difficulties of the case. These difficulties are illustrated in the efforts of the seven-year-old boy already mentioned. Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone, since older children regard them as "babies" and adults seldom play during the hours when children are awake. As a result, forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or are even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse.
This difficulty of the gifted child in forming friendships is largely a result of the infrequency of persons who are like-minded. The more intelligent a person is, regardless of age, the less often can he find a truly congenial companion. The average child finds playmates in abundance who can think and act on a level congenial to him because there are so many average children.
Adding to the conditions which make for isolation is the fact that gifted children are often "only" children, or they have brothers and sisters who differ widely from them in age. Thus playmates in the home are less numerous for them than for children generally.
The imaginary playmate as a solution of the problem of loneliness is fairly frequent. We know but little at present of the psychology of this invention of the unreal to fill real needs. Reasoning from the general principles of mental hygiene, one would say that the pattern of companionship represented in the imaginary playmate is less valuable for personal development than a pattern founded on reality, and that effort should be made to fill the real need with genuine persons, if possible.
Also, the deep interest in reading which typifies the gifted child may further his isolation. Irwin believes that reading should be deferred in the education of the highly intelligent. "I believe it is especially important that intellectual children get a grasp on reality through real experiences in making and doing things before they are ever introduced to the wonders that lie within books." From this point of view, the development of the physical, social, and emotional aspects of personality would have first attention in the education of a gifted child, the intellectual being fostered last of all because it comes of itself and is too likely to run away with the other three and lead to isolation.
This tendency to become isolated is one of the most important factors to be considered in guiding the development of personality in highly intelligent children, but it does not become a serious problem except at the very extreme degrees of intelligence. The majority of children between 130 and 150 IQ find fairly easy adjustment, because neighborhoods and schools are selective, so that like-minded children tend to be located in the same schools and districts. Furthermore, the gifted child, being large and strong for his age, is acceptable to playmates a year or two older. Great difficulty arises only when a young child is above 160 IQ. At the extremely high levels of 180 and 190 IQ, the problem of friendships is difficult indeed, and the younger the person, the more difficult it is. The trouble decreases with age because as persons become adult, they naturally seek and find on their own initiative groups who are like-minded, such as learned societies.
The anecdote of the 7-year-old comes in the previous section, also worth reading:
LEARNING TO "SUFFER FOOLS GLADLY"
A lesson which many gifted persons never learn as long as they live is that human beings in general are inherently very different from themselves in thought, in action, in general intention, and in interests. Many a reformer has died at the hands of a mob which he was trying to improve in the belief that other human beings can and should enjoy what he enjoys. This is one of the most painful and difficult lessons that each gifted child must learn, if personal development is to proceed successfully. It is more necessary that this be learned than that any school subject be mastered. Failure to learn how to tolerate in a reasonable fashion the foolishness of others leads to bitterness, disillusionment, and misanthropy.
This point may be illustrated by the behavior of a seven-year-old boy with an IQ of 178. He was not sent to school until the age of seven because of his advanced interest in reading. At seven, however, the compulsory attendance law took effect and the child was placed in the third grade at school. After about four weeks of attendance, he came home from school weeping bitterly. "Oh Grandmother, Grand-mother," he cried, "they don't know what's good! They just won't read!"
The fact came to light that he had taken book after book to school—all his favorites from his grandfather's library—and had tried to show the other third-grade pupils what treasures these were, but the boys and girls only resisted his efforts, made fun of him, threw the treasures on the floor, and finally pulled his hair.
Such struggles as these, if they continue without directing the child's insight, may lead to complete alienation from his contemporaries in childhood, and to misanthropy in adolescence and adulthood. Particularly deplorable are the struggles of these children against dull or otherwise unworthy adults in authority. The very gifted child or adolescent, perceiving the illogical conduct of those in charge of his affairs, may turn rebellious against all authority and fall into a condition of negative suggestibility—a most unfortunate trend of personality, since the person is then unable to take a coöperative attitude toward authority.
A person who is highly suggestible in a negative direction is as much in bondage to others around him as is the person who is positively suggestible. The social value of the person is seriously impaired in either case. The gifted are not likely to fall victims to positive suggestion but many of them develop negativism to a conspicuous degree.
The highly intelligent child will be intellectually capable of self-determination, and his greatest value to society can be realized only if he is truly self-possessed and detached from the influences of both positive and negative suggestion. The more intelligent the child, the truer this statement is. It is especially unfortunate, therefore, that so many gifted children have in authority over them persons of no special fitness for the task, who cannot gain or keep the respect of these good thinkers. Such unworthy guardians arouse, by the process of "redintegration," contempt for authority wherever it is found, and the inability to yield gracefully to command.
Thus some gifted persons, mishandled in youth, become contentious, aggressive, and stubborn to an extent which renders them difficult and disagreeable in all human relationships involving subordination. Since subordination must precede posts of command in the ordinary course of life, this is an unfortunate trend of personality. Cynicism and negativism are likely to interfere seriously with a life career. Happily, gifted children are typically endowed with a keen sense of humor, and are apparently able to mature beyond cynicism eventually in a majority of cases.
(I wonder what percentage of Less Wrongers see themselves in the above passages)
So. It seems to me that this social isolation (in the sense of failure to make friends) is not a good thing; like accidentally exploding things in chemistry experiments as a teenager, it correlates with great ability or potential, but in itself, it is probably a negative thing.
It's possible that deliberately engineering the above situation in youth is a high-risk, high-reward strategy. There are probably some geniuses for whom failure to make friends ended up causing, perhaps even motivating, them to spend all their time thinking or tinkering and thereby making great discoveries. But there are others for whom failure to make friends meant they didn't understand other people, weren't motivated to help them, and therefore didn't create startups to solve their problems, and instead retreated from the world: into games, fantasy, alcohol, drugs, or what have you. I'm skeptical that it has positive expected value, even if you had a completely ruthless, Ender's Game style attitude of "All I care about is the likelihood that they'll become a world-shaking genius; if I increase that by 1% in exchange for turning the median case from 'moderately successful professional' to 'homeless drug addict', that's worth it".
All that said, voluntarily entering temporary periods of isolation as an adult (knowing one can come back anytime) is very different from being involuntarily isolated since early childhood. The former is a perfectly fine thing to try, and quite plausibly good for the reasons described in this post. The latter I would strongly disrecommend.
What is solitude?
I have thoughts about "loneliness", a related concept:
- There are many kinds of social interaction that you can want, need, or benefit from. (If we need to distinguish a "want" from a "need", I'd say a "need" is something that causes more negative effects than simple frustration if it's not satisfied.)
- Interaction types that probably register as a "need" to at least some people: seeing human faces; having fun with friends; discussing your problems with someone; intellectual stimulation; sexual and romantic activities; probably more.
- I'm sure there is wide individual variation on how much people need these things.
- Interaction types that probably register as a "need" to at least some people: seeing human faces; having fun with friends; discussing your problems with someone; intellectual stimulation; sexual and romantic activities; probably more.
- "Loneliness" is when there's at least one type of interaction that you're getting less of than you need.
- It follows that you can be lonely despite spending hours a day surrounded by people, if those people aren't giving you the type of interaction you need. (I came up with this definition to explain precisely this situation.)
"Solitude" naively means being physically alone; related to "solitary". If you want a more sophisticated definition, then in the above context I would say it means the state where there is some interaction type the person isn't getting. "Solitude" also carries a nonnegative and maybe-positive connotation, implying that the person didn't need the interaction, or possibly that leaving the need unsatisfied brings benefits that exceed the negatives.
It seems like you, or at least Cal Newport, are picking a subset of the above list of social interactions and declaring that to be what "solitude" refers to. I am inclined to frown upon this, and recommend picking a more specific term, like "intellectual solitude". Like, for each of them, you could imagine cases in which it's good to self-isolate at least temporarily, but I think the benefits, the reasons for the benefits, and the situations in which they're net beneficial are pretty different for e.g. romantic solitude vs "seeing human faces" solitude vs "solving my own problems" solitude vs "coming up with my own intellectual ideas and research directions" solitude vs "feeling secure and happy by myself" solitude; the cases may rhyme somewhat with each other, and that may be worth noting, but most of the discussion should be about the specific kinds of solitude.
Just because the average person disapproves of a protest tactic doesn't mean that the tactic doesn’t work. Roger Hallam's "Designing the Revolution" series outlines the thought process underlying disruptive actions like the infamous soup-throwing protests. Reasonable people may disagree (I disagree with quite a few things he says), but if you don't know the arguments, any objection is going to miss the point. To be clear, PauseAI does not endorse or engage in disruptive civil disobedience, but I discuss it here to illustrate some broader points. Anyways, “Designing the Revolution” is very long, so here's a tl/dr:
- If the public response is: "I'm all for the cause those protestors are advocating, but I can't stand their methods"...notice that the first half of this statement was approval of the only thing that matters—approval of the cause itself.
But that approval may have predated the protest, and might have been reduced by it. Have you encountered this research? "Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements". Abstract:
Social movements are critical agents of change that vary greatly in both tactics and popular support. Prior work shows that extreme protest tactics – actions that are highly counter-normative, disruptive, or harmful to others, including inflammatory rhetoric, blocking traffic, and damaging property – are effective for gaining publicity. However, we find across three experiments that extreme protest tactics decreased popular support for a given cause because they reduced feelings of identification with the movement. Though this effect obtained in tests of popular responses to extreme tactics used by animal rights, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Trump protests (Studies 1-3), we found that self-identified political activists were willing to use extreme tactics because they believed them to be effective for recruiting popular support (Studies 4a & 4b). The activist’s dilemma – wherein tactics that raise awareness also tend to reduce popular support – highlights a key challenge faced by social movements struggling to affect progressive change.
Excerpt:
Study 1. Participants read about a fictional animal rights activist group called Free the Vulnerable (FTV). The extremity of the movement’s protest behavior was manipulated at three levels: Moderate Protest, Extreme Protest, or Highly Extreme Protest conditions. The protesters in the two extreme protest conditions engaged in unlawful activities (e.g., breaking into an animal testing facility) modeled after protest activities of real-life activists, while the activists in the Moderate Protest condition peacefully marched in protest. [...] After participants read their assigned article, they completed measures of perceived extremity, social identification with the movement and support for it.
Important results: Social identification with the movement was 2.70, 2.48, 2.28 for moderate, extreme, and highly extreme protest conditions respectively. Support for the movement: 3.07, 2.60, 2.62.
Read more of the paper to see more similar results. It is nice to see them. For example, in the study with fictional BLM protests:
These results suggest that both African Americans and non-African Americans perceived protesters as more extreme and felt less support for them in the Extreme Protest condition.
[...] Thus, as with participant race, these results suggest that participants, regardless of their political ideology, reacted negatively to extreme protests.
And the study with fictional anti-Trump protests:
Together, these results suggest that regardless of pre-existing attitudes regarding Trump’s candidacy, participants in the Extreme Protest condition viewed the protesters as more extreme and reported less support for the movement.
I would also comment that, if the environment was so chaotic that roughly everything important to life could not be modeled—if general-purpose modeling ability was basically useless—then life would not have evolved that ability, and "intelligent life" probably wouldn't exist.
But those people are distributed fairly evenly throughout society. Each one is surrounded by lots of people of >100 IQ, and probably knows at least a few of >115 IQ, etc. Whereas if it's an entire indigenous population, and integration is far from complete, then there are likely whole villages that are almost entirely aboriginal. That's an important difference.
One consequence: I expect that, in order to do a good job at various important management roles (managing a power plant, a sewer system, etc.), you basically need a high enough IQ. A hard cutoff is an oversimplification, but, to illustrate, Google results suggest that doctors' average IQ is between 120 and 130, and there might be villages of 1000 people with no one fitting that description. (And even if you think the IQ test results are, say, more reflective of a "Western Quotient"—the ability+willingness to work well with Western ideas and practices—it seems that lots of these jobs require precisely that. Using and maintaining Western machines; negotiating on behalf of the village with mostly-Western cities and higher levels of government; evaluating land development proposals; and so on.)
Then, running with the above scenario, either the village doesn't have modern infrastructure, or it has modern infrastructure managed badly, or it has modern infrastructure managed by Westerners. The first two are bad, and the third might be a constant source of ethnic grievances if anyone is unhappy with the arrangement. (Exercise: ask an AI for historical examples of each of the above, and see if they're genuine.) Thus: a problem with democracy. And voting, in particular, might turn the third case into the second case.
I didn't call it comprehensive. It's a useful tool, and often the first one I reach for. but not always the only tool.
Then your opponent can counter-argue that your statements are true but cherry-picked, or that your argument skips logical steps xyz and those steps are in fact incorrect. If your opponent instead chooses to say that for you to make those statements is unacceptable behavior, then it's unfortunate that your opposition is failing to represent its side well. As an observer, depending on my purposes and what I think I already know, I have many options, ranging from "evaluating the arguments presented" to "researching the issue myself".
OP didn't use the word "threat". He said he was "very curious about aboriginals" and asked how do you live with them. You can interpret it as a rhetorical question, meaning he's saying it's impossible to live with them, and his "very curious" was disingenuous; or you can interpret it as a genuine question. I think I've countered your argument about "completely dissolves"; for illustration, you can even forget IQ and substitute "familiarity with Western technology", and imagine a village consisting of 10% Westerners and 90% indigenous people who have never owned a car or a computer. Surely that has the potential to cause problems; and it could indeed be interesting to know more specifics about what has gone wrong in practice, how people have addressed it, and how well it's working.